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Born in Yonkers, New York, Yates came from an unstable home. His parents divorced when he was 3 and much of his childhood was spent in many different towns and residences. Yates first became interested in journalism and writing while attending Avon Old Farms School in Avon, Connecticut.

In 1962, he wrote the screenplay for a film adaptation of William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness.

In 1948, he married Sheila Bryant, the daughter of Marjorie Gilhooley Bryant and British actor Charles Bryant, who had lived with Broadway actress and silent-film star Alla Nazimova during the height of her wealth and fame, from 1952 to 1955. Richard and Sheila Yates had two daughters, Sharon and Monica, before divorcing in 1959. He remarried in 1968 to Martha Speer, with whom he had a daughter named Gina.[8] In 1992, he died of emphysema and complications from minor surgery in Birmingham, Alabama.[9]

Yates's fiction was autobiographical in nature, as his fiction included much of his own life. Yates was born in 1926, making him 17 in 1943, the same age in that year as William Grove in A Good School; and he was 29 in 1955, the same age in that year as Frank Wheeler in Revolutionary Road; and 36 in 1962, the age Emily Grimes was that year in The Easter Parade.[12]

With the revival of interest in Yates's life and work after his death, Blake Bailey published the first in-depth biography of Yates, A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates (2003). Film director Sam Mendes directed Revolutionary Road, a 2008 Anglo-American drama film, based on the 1961 novel of the same name by Richard Yates. The film was nominated for BAFTAs, Golden Globes, Academy Awards, and others. Kate Winslet thanked Richard Yates for writing such a powerful novel and providing such a strong role for a woman while accepting a Golden Globe for Best Actress Award for the film.[14]

Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, Yates' first collection, followed the publication of his famed first novel Revolutionary Road by a single year. It was compared favorably to James Joyce's Dubliners (all but one of its stories take place in and around the boroughs of New York City as opposed to Joyce's Dublin) and eventually achieved a kind of cult status among fiction writers despite its relative obscurity. One later New York Times essay praised Yates' "exposure of the small fiercely defended dignities and much vaster humiliations of characters who might have been picked almost at random from the fat telephone book of the Borough of Queens."[15]

Yates' second collection, Liars in Love, appeared nearly 20 years later, in 1981, and was again met with a positive critical reception. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, writing for the Times, called the stories "wonderfully crafted," and concluded that "every detail of this collection stays alive and fresh in one's memory."[16]

Despite this, only one of Yates' short stories ever appeared in The New Yorker (after repeated rejections), and none during his lifetime. This story, "The Canal," was published in the magazine nine years after the author's death to celebrate the 2001 release of The Collected Stories of Richard Yates, a collection that was again met with great critical fanfare.

In Seinfeld, the character Alton Benes, Elaine Benes's father, was inspired by Richard Yates, since Larry David did once date his daughter Monica. The suede jacket incident depicted on the episode "The Jacket" really happened.[11]